Creators let brands be human and business at once. Scripted corporate marketing is finished. In an answer engine world, be the one or two, never page two.

Sutton has loved social media for a long time, learning a ton in the early days of YouTube because it gave him access to information he could not find any other way. He grew up in automotive, and when he wanted to learn about lean, manufacturing or how customers experienced the vehicles, he went to social. He later did a stint at ZoomInfo, which by his account he helped take public, before a former colleague pointed him towards a company doing great things in the creator space. He instantly saw the opportunity in the market and with the customers, and joined Later.

His colleagues never stop hearing about automotive factories and lean. People assume a plant producing semi-trucks has nothing to offer creator marketing, but Sutton thinks his gift is not any one industry, it is working with people, process and technology to solve complex process problems. Delivering results in influencer marketing is a complicated sequence of steps needing data, human interaction and different tools, and he brings an outside perspective to people who live in it every day.

When Sutton joined he found a business selling software licences into agencies and large brands. He took a step back and asked where the money was actually being spent, and found roughly 30 billion dollars of ad spend already flowing into the creator economy, which he says is slated to reach 100 billion dollars by 2030. So the company completely pivoted and now runs ad dollars through its platform.

Creators are no longer just a top of funnel play. They permeate connected TV and linear TV ads, they appear in display, they drive commerce at the bottom of the funnel, and they still do the traditional celebrity endorsement work. By his account they have permeated the entire marketing stack.

Sutton treats authenticity as a relationship with an audience built on common ground. If you personify most businesses they only talk about themselves, their finances, their investors. Creators are different because they can be human and business at once, talking about feelings and the bottom line, and they can take a stance an older brand cannot. So the brand gets to borrow the voice of the creator and borrow that viewpoint, to connect in a way it cannot say itself.

Brands are more comfortable now because creators are far more professional at managing a brand-safe personal brand, understanding that the wrong content reflects poorly on every partner. At the same time brands have loosened the old restrictions where you had to hit the talking points, taking more risk and showing more personality even on their own organic social. Those things converge into more freedom.

Sutton wants the whole paradigm of highly scripted corporate marketing to go away, replaced by storytelling, connection and resonance. The best ads move you, create an emotion or a question, make you laugh. No one has ever been inspired by the five talking points of a product marketer. He compares it to a car website, which sells the emotion, the freedom, the wind through your hair, not the torque of the lug nuts or how well the frame is welded. Marketers need to bring out that emotion and work with creators to do it.

Sutton separates generative engine optimization, the overall sentiment and ethos a model holds about a brand across the world's data, from answer engine optimization, the referenced pages a model pulls for a specific product. Ask ChatGPT what Nike is and it draws a communal understanding, not one website. For AEO the cited sources are most often creators: YouTube transcripts, Reddit, Substack. He focuses on creator-based AEO to pinpoint specific products, especially new to market, because a new product has no training data, so you need to be the exact source found.

Where Google gives a page of ten to twenty results, a model returns one, maybe two. So you need to be one or two always, whereas before people settled for page one or two. Sutton says everyone knows this is important but does not quite know what to do with it, so his team helps brands see where they rank, what is cited, and runs campaigns to become the sourced reference, then measures how often they come up as the number one answer. You still have to run a great business to be suggested, because the model is looking for confirmation points.

It is remarkable, Sutton says, when B2B companies lean into personalisation, which is why executive personal brands and employees as creators are rising, creating a new set of creators who elevate their careers while promoting their company. He points to the NFL, where Tim Ellis started the Helmets Off program to show players as human beings, humanising what could have been just stats and results. All brands, B2C and B2B, can channel universal truths like aspiration and hope. It is not just a B2B trend, but he thinks B2B is the furthest behind.

Between e-commerce, creator content and ratings and reviews, product quality and brand efficacy are very well understood, which forces brands to improve to survive. Sutton cites a niche YouTube channel, Vacuum Wars, that tests 37 robot vacuums in an unbiased way. You can make creator content, but the product has to stand up. He sees a virtuous cycle where products are forced to get better or the dollars run out, creators walk away and sales dry up, and if products are bad it does not take long for the world to find out.

Shark Ninja nails both the creative social side and product quality, selling out before launch through TikTok Live and TikTok Shop. LOLA blankets, a born on social brand, works with top creators on custom colourways and seasonal scarcity, with discounting to drive demand. The winning products tend to be used by most of the population, easy to target online, bought online and mass manufactured, which is why blankets and boots work and cars, with dealers and multi-year cycles, are harder.

Everyone now knows they need to work with creators, so it is just the how. Influencer is not finding one person and hoping for the best. There is celebrity endorsement, macro, creator at scale, ambassador, affiliate, micro, nano and UGC, all woven into one strategy. Sutton's advice is to start with business and marketing goals, decide whether it is top, mid or bottom of funnel, then overlay creators across linear and connected TV, social, at scale performance plays and affiliate programs.

Do not let a creator make one piece of content that dies on social. It is only a few more dollars to license it, and it performs better than a crappy infographic. Brands have moved from treating it as just social, to boosting the posts that do well, to refactoring them into dedicated ads, to pushing them onto connected TV, display and billboards, and now onto their own sites and product pages. For massive retail, Sutton's team will generate a quarter of a million pieces of UGC to post on marketplace product pages because it beats static imagery.

Sutton travels roughly 45 weeks a year to learn in conversations, follows the newsletters and press, and coded a CEO second brain in Claude code to aggregate the data coming into his world. He believes inspiration does not need to come from your exact domain, it needs to come from whoever is the expert regardless of domain, and he uses history as a tool so he does not repeat mistakes a million people have made. Most of his job is hiring, coaching and mentoring, because people are business.

His reverse problem funnel means problems distil upward until, at the top, there is no one to hand them to. Many people run away from problems, but you should run headlong into them, because solving the worst challenges makes you bomb-proof. People imagine a great company has no problems, yet inside fast-growing firms it is chaos. Every business that is growing quickly is a bit of controlled chaos, and theory of constraints says solving one bottleneck only reveals the next, so the work is never done.